I’m starting to write this post when Ignite 2018 is approaching the end, so the time is preparing for a summary. A year ago, when I wrote about Ignite 2017, I thought that the conference was presenting revolution solutions to the market in many areas. I had a sense of wow – maybe because I was in the USA for the first time 🙂 . But I’m a passionate Microsoft fan for a long time.

Now the conference is still great, but there’s no something amazing.

The guiding idea was digital transformation. If anyone interested in you read more under this link.

Ignite 2018

Ignite 2018 – evolution yes, revolution not

I will start with Keynote and Satya Nadella’s speech. Maybe I am exaggerating, but I had the impression that the Microsoft’s CEO has an hour on stage and must somehow fill it. Really. And many other people said that his speech was completely bland. Adobe and SAP alliance in the field of shared use of data? So far, no details, so it’s hard to say anything more.

Keynote

Charitable programs are important and needed, but where are all those crazy things for geeks here? Besides zero particulars as for me.

Cortana – are you still alive?

Office 365 and SharePoint are my main interests, but honestly, nothing has failed me as the lack of any major news or announcements that would apply to assistant Microsoft Cortana. It will be Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise, but what about me?

Some time ago I turned it on in my Windows 10 thinking that it might be an interesting experience. Nothing of that. Cortana really can do very little, and what’s more, she sometimes works, and sometimes not – you can scream Hey Cortana, and she will be like a deaf. And I heard a news that earlier or later, Alexa will permanently reside in Windows 10. Already, some of the laptops sold in the US have Alexa installed.

Office 365, MS Teams, Flow and Azure – must have

For anyone who was on site or watched Ignite 2018 it was clear that those technologies are Microsoft’s future and core business in the years to come. Already, Microsoft Teams have all the functionalities of Skype for Business, and new options are added all the time. It is very cool to be able to create your own solutions using the SharePoint Framework. You can see that all these technologies are penetrating more and more and are starting to form a very coherent ecosystem. For example, it will be possible to write a bot to which we will be able to call from the Teams level and ask questions. Cool 🙂 !

Soon, Microsoft (November of this year) Microsoft Teams will be available in the Graph API.

I also like the direction Flow goes. It is not a perfect technology, but the possibilities that appear in it are really impressive. For example, a process that reads incoming emails from attached PDFs and extracts personal data and loads them, for example, into Microsoft Dynamics. It’s really awesome.

A few beads at the end

From other things I remembered is a broadcast in Microsoft Stream. This can be a cool option in a large company when you want to make a live streaming event. Another great feature is the ability to search a recordings for a phrase. So imagine that you have a recording from a meeting at Microsoft Teams and you are looking for a word that has been spoken. Works great. What’s more, this option is also available in OneDrive.

Smart hints in the Office suite. In a big simplification, this means that AI analyses our document and proposes solutions that will make it better. I saw it live. Sometimes there are very cool effects.

PowerShell. I was in one session and I will tell you how to take off. I do not remember its number right now, but anyone who has any contact with PowerShell should see it. It was run by guys who belong to the product team. PowerShell is open source at the moment, and the new version (6.1) brings, among others, the ability to manage cross-platform. Chad.

But it is also not about knowledge in this case. The way of conducting this session was ewesome. Anyone who wants to or should have a presentation should see how professionals do it.

What’s next?

Well, that’s probably enough. I encourage everyone to watch the session recordings, they should be available soon. Of course, some of them are a waste of time, but many of them are worth every minute. You can learn a lot, and what’s more, you can have a lot of new ideas for implementation in your organization. That’s why I love Ignite. After 5 days, I have my head studded with ideas and inspiration. And it’s time to Ignite 2018 attendee celebration. A year ago it was superb so I hope that this time I will play like a child again.

Few days ago I have chance to play with SharePoint online solution called Hubfly and I was really impressed with his capabilities. And here is my review. So let’s start from the begging.

I wrote a few time on this blog that the main problem with SharePoint is that it looks like a SharePoint. And it’s problem for me as I don’t have graphic designer skills. Well, Hubfly change everything here. As Hubfly is deployed to the customers SharePoint as a SaaS model, it offers the flexibility of integrating additional functionalities that customers may want using their in-house team. Unlike other Intranet-as-a-service providers who store data outside the customers’ environment, Hubfly allows storage of customer data on the customers’ SharePoint itself.

The advantage of Hubfly is that it works as drag & drop, which make working with it very easy and available to almost everyone, also non technical people.

Let’s start with a few features which Hubfly provide to us.

Key features in Hubfly

Here is the example of home page.

Hubfly Home Page

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Please note that this is only top of the page. There’s much more that, it’s just not possible to put everything here, but you can see it on the second print screen.

Hubfly CMS

As you can see there’s a lot of options which are available to us. For example we have holidays feature which present on the home page who and when is on a vacation. We can inform also about latest event or post new open positions in our company. And all those option you can activate on the main page with drag & drop. Well, that’s easy.

At this moment we have following widgets here:

Apps

Quicklinks

Social

Documents

Leaderboard

Polls

Holidays calendar

Job posting

People

You mange all those widgets and the content with user friendly CMS.

Ok, let’s move forward. Now it’s time for documents. As you know this main SharePoint option to store documents. As you can see below typical view of SharePoint library has been replaced with more user friendly view. And second image shows what you will see when you will hover mouse pointer over document tile.

Documents in Hubfly

Hover document

To be honest I prefer more classic view. I don’t know maybe I am too old 🙂 ? Anyway I know that for most users such view could more interesting than the standard one. Also in very similar way works employee directory. I mean that you see employ list as a tiles and when you hover over it you can click on it to see details. As some of those information could be sensitive I will not put them here.

There’s some other features which could be useful like ideas or stories, but I would like to focus on two which are very powerful to me.

Hubfly Insight

What’s Hubfly Insight? In general it’s set of reports which could present to you different information about your company in user friendly way.

Hubfly Insight

This feature utilize Microsoft Power Bi engine to provide you those reports. As you can see you could have several reports like HR Analysis or IT Analysis. As you can reports is very clean which make it very easy to understand to everyone.

Hubfly forms

The last point are Hubfly forms. And from my point of view this the best feature of this solution.

Hubfly forms

At moment you will get 5 forms, which you can configure by your own in very easy way. Those 5 forms cover most of typical company scenarios and for the most companies it will absolutely enough. Right now you will get:

service request

travel request

travel reimbursement

mileage reimbursement

visitor pass

What’s very important here you get also workflow behind those forms! So you don’t need to develop anything by your own. Also as you see above this feature groups all possible option which could be somehow related to the forms and processed behind.

And that’s it. From my point of view this very good solution for the company without it department or developers. In this case company could get very easy and very fast solution which makes their company SharePoint looking very nice and with some cools option available to users.

Anyway you check all those things if they interesting to you. Check this link and request for a demo.

Microsoft Teams is rather new app in Office 365 family, but it seems that it’s going to be almost most important. From my point of view Microsoft has started to promote it at last Ignite. After view months they are still pushing forward, and the next Ignite will be focused on it. This post is short introduction to Microsoft Teams.

This application is Microsoft answer to growing popularity of group collaboration applications, and best example here is Slack. Here is the link, where you can read their answer to the information that Microsoft Teams has been released to public. They are not going to give up 🙂 .

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Microsoft Teams – what are we talking about?

So why we should be so exited? Microsoft Teams is a part of Office 365, with all related things, like OneDrive, groups, planner, etc, and link to all data in our tenant. We can run the application in the browser, as stand alone client and mobile app. And below you can see application interface.

Microsoft Teams

In general we have 3 windows:

First windows give to us basic options like chat or teams

In the second window you make more detailed selection, like team or team channels

In this window we will see all details. Especially we can see chat and chat history, all related documents, etc

With this menu we can extend our channel with additional features. For example we connect our team with task in Planner or we can put a file there

If you want to play by yourself with Microsoft teams there’s interactive demo, which could you guide you through most important functions. You can find it here.

Microsoft Teams – first steps

Application is very simple to use. We just need press “Add team”, then “Add channel” and you are ready to go. Then we need just add team member to chat with them, share documents, etc.

Why I am writing about this? This application is very easy to use, you need just few minutes to find out how it works. Well, there are few reasons…

Few days ago someone asked me if he should switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams. I said if you already use Slack and you are not big company with Office 365 rather no. You shouldn’t change something what’s already working and everyone knows.

But If you have Office 365 you should really consider this. Microsoft Teams has access to all information stored in your tenant. This is huge benefit which is used by Microsoft. You have everything in one place, the same users accounts, and nice people from Redmond take care about your data.

Second reason is official announcement from Microsoft that Microsoft Teams is going to replace Skype. Of course it stills needs more features, but Microsoft works very hard to add new capabilities to the app. If you want to find out what and when will be available to you check this site: Skype for Business and Teams Features Comparison Table.

And last reason is that you can extent Microsoft Teams with own features. Really. The most know example is possibility to write Bots. By default you will get one bot from Microsoft which provide you basic help options.

In next post I will show you how to use it, but know I strongly recommend to take your time and make own tests. Have fun !

Today I would like to write a few words about Migrating File Shares to SharePoint Online. Many things here is based on my personal experience as also on latest Ignite conference news. To be honest for last couple of years such migration wasn’t easy task to do. But It seems that this is something what’s changing. Previously it was done by partners, and if you wanted to do this by yourself it was a challenging task. Also tolls from external vendors are really expensive.

From my point of view we could feel wind of change at the latest conference. There’re couple of sessions which take care about every step of migration process. Also what’s more important Microsoft decided to provide us a tools which make Migrating File Shares to SharePoint Online very easy.

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But before I get into details I would like to show you few important things.

Migrating File Shares to SharePoint Online is opportunity to make clean up

There’s old IT sentence: Garbage in, garbage out. I mean that if you have a mess on your network share do not expect that after Migrating File Shares to SharePoint Online you will get clear environment. No, it’s not gonna happen. It will just get worse. Migration is a chance for you to do inventory of your environment

What’s on your network drive

What’s going to be left

What’s going to be migrated

At this point you should ask your users if all their stuffs are really necessary? You can find very often 10 versions of the same file… Of course usually they will just say that all it’s very important. But if the file wasn’t touched for 2 or 3 years maybe it’s not so important… Of course it could different in case of financial report or agreement.

What we have?

It’s very important to know what we have.

Where’s our data? I mean that we should be aware of fact that some servers are very old, with slow disks or network interface. It could slow down your migration process

How much data we have transfer? Believe me copying process take some time, and your users want to work…

What’s the data? Word file is different than AutoCad. Yes, there was a case that one of my client transferred such files to the cloud…

Are your data actual? This something what happened to me. Nice lady forgot that she has on her desktop latest version of very important file which is used by entire company…

SharePoint migration tool

Lets’ assume that already we know all those things – you have migration plan. How to start it? A couple weeks it wasn’t so easy. You have to pay for external solution or do manual operation. Today I would like to show a tool which solved all my problems, and make Migrating File Shares to SharePoint Online very simple. SharePoint migration tool is a free application provided by Microsoft, which can be downloaded here. For me it has two main features:

it moves metadata, for example last modification date of the file and who done it. In my case date of last modification was crucial. And if you copy file manually you will lose this information

And the second option is differential migration. I mean that tool is able to discover if something has change in migrated resource and move any changed or new files

Lets’ take a look how it works.

This start screen of the application. In the first step you have to log in into your tenant.

SharePoint Migration Tool

Then in the next step you have select your data source. It worth to say that this still improved by Microsoft and soon we should new features here. And in my case I am going to select „File Share”

File Share

And in the next step we should provide path to migrated data

Network Drive

And the next step is mapping process itself. It’s important to notice that we have possibility to save the task. In such case we have possibility to run it again. If we will do it process will search for the changes in source and if it will discover something it will make migration.

Source And Destination

And if the mapping is completed we can press migration button,

Migrate

After that new window will appear where we can track data copy progress.

Migration Process

And that’s all. The tool is very simple but even that it great. Right now it’s in beta version (GA on Q1 2018) . For me it was working perfect.

This is the second part of my “SharePoint designer workflow” blog post series. The first one you can read here. Today you will read how we can design workflow itself. In general, idea of workflow building is very simple. You will add stages to which will be run by the process after event will occur. We have three events which can trigger our workflow:

manually started

when an item is created

when an item is changed

Every stage when is finished can move to the next one; it can come back to previous or it could finish the flow. We make this decision in the field “transition to the stage”. You can see those options below.

transition to stage

Key workflow element

As you can see above we can put also conditions to our transition stage. It allows as yo make decision about which step will be run next. We can use such approach to emulate state workflow. It wasn’t possible in previous version of SharePoint. In some situation it’s very useful feature.

Next element which is crucial are actions. They are blocks which are used to do all possible operation. And in general actions names are self describing.

Worfklow actions

Another important part is condition operation. We can use them to check different condition which can exist or verify some information which are provided by the user. For example we can check if someone is valid SharePoint user. Imagine that you have text field which will be used to collect information about users. But we can’t be sure that information are valid, and if we use wrong data workflow will get an error and will be broken. With such condition we will just check it and if the data is wrong we can make something different.

workflow condition

The last piece are loops. We use them to check if any expected event occurred. Or in different option we can run a loop n times. And here’s one important information in terms of SharePoint online. If you will create workflow which contains many loops “Loop with Condition” it could happen that your process will be suspended by the engine. In logs you will find information that you exceed your resources throttle (more here ). In general it’s Microsoft protection to protect their servers. If you have such Problem you have to rebuild your process and use different actions. For example you can stop the process for some amount of time and then use condition action.

workflow loop

And that’s all at this moment in next part I will show you have to build real process which will utilize all key elements which I was talking about.

Today I would like to show you that Damaged wan port is not end of your router life. Few weeks ago I was travelling when in Poland was a lot of storms. When I come back I have discovered that there’s no internet connection in my house. It was strange as just few days before I was connecting without any problem. Ok, let’s check. In my NetGear R7000 console I discovered the message that there WAN cable is unplugged. But it was there… After few minutes later I discovered damaged wan port. I went to the store and bought new router- I can’t live without Internet connection. But I was still thinking about my NetGear R7000… It’s not cheap device but has really powerful capabilities.

Also I needed router which will give me possibility to remotely access my home network. So I have started my small research…

Damaged wan port – what we can do

I have found that it happen very often. I mean that you have damaged wan port, especially it could happen if you use radio internet connection. Probably it’s linked to wired powers, flows, etc. Unfortunately there’s no protection against such accidents. And that was my case – WAN port was not working, but all LAN ports and internal components were fine.

Fixing cost of the device was crazy, the price was almost the same as new router, so when you start thinking about it you will find out that there’s one option here only. You have to force your router to use one LAN port as WAN. Well, when you take a look you will discover that NetGear R7000 is really powerful, but without such options in the Genie menu. But there’s still hope. There’s nice feature that NetGear allows us to upload custom firmware to your device. Ok, let’s take a look.

I have a read a little here and I have found out that my problem solution could be open firmware for Asus called Asuswrt-Merlin. It’s Tomato modification for Asus routers. And what important is there’s also version prepared for NetGear R7000 and some other models too. I was saved!!!

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Damaged wan port – how I have saved my NetGear R7000

Upload of new firmware is very simple. First of all reset your R7000 to factory default settings. Now it’s time to grab new software from here . Now connect to your router via LAN port, open router console and upload new firmware. In the first step we should upload file R7000_xxx.xx_x.chk . Then we should make reset and reboot of the device. Now it’s time for next file called R7000_xxx.xx_x.trx . And that’s it! If everything was ok you should see screen like this one below.

Asuswrt-Merlin

Now just one step left for us. You should go to advanced settings -> WAN – > Dual WAN. Turn on this feature and restart again your R7000. After that you will get new option here. You can set one of your LAN ports as main WAN port. As Dual WAN option you should select “backup switch”. You don’t need to configure routing between ports or something like this. Your device will take care about this. And that’s all.

I always thought that making design of SharePoint Designer Workflow is really simple task for everyone. Well… It seems that I was wrong. Of course if you do this on daily basis it will be simple for you, but when you start from scratch it could be a real challenge. So today I am going to write first post from the series about sharepoint designer workflow. Of course to do this we need SharePoint designer which is right now free tool which can be downloaded form Microsoft site

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Are you ready? So let’s start. The first step which you should do is “Open Site“. It means that you have to open “place :)” where our workflow will run. At the begging few words of explanations. We have three kind of workflows

Workflow type

List Workflow

Reusable Workflow

Site Workflow

In general most of you workflow will be List workflow. It means that the process will be pinned to existing list or library and use properties of it. Please take a look at the print screen below. This is how your SharePoint designer screen will looks like when you select from left menu List and libraries and then something specific.

SharePoint designer menu

Let’s create first SharePoint Designer Workflow

Press the button List Workflow. You will see window like below. You have to enter process name and workflow type

Create list workflow

We have two options here. One of them is SharePoint 2013 workflow, and the second is SharePoint 2010. The important thing here is that in some cases SharePoint 2010 process could be necessary to meet some requirements. For example when you to send out emails message out side of your organization tenant in SharePoint online. It’s not possible in SharePoint 2013 designer workflow.

The most important difference is that 2013 workflow can act as State Workflow, which means that we can turn back to the action which already happened in the process. In case of SharePoint 2010 you do not have such option. Workflow process steps one by one in sequence.

Ok. Let come back to our form. Enter workflow name, then select type and press ok. And when we can do next I will write in the next post.

Norton Security is my preferred application to protect my computers for years, so I never expected that I run into a problems with my new Windows 10 clean installation. But let’s start from the begging. Two days ago I have to do clean Windows 10 installation. I done this as many times before, no problems here. And after that I installed Norton Security from Symantec site. Also this part went smoothly. But after I restarted my PC error screen appeared “Diagnosing your PC“. And then another screen error that problem can’t be fixed. And again and again in a loop. What’s the hell???

I tried few solutions and nothing was working for me. For example I have fully updated Norton Security before Windows has been restarted. Nothing.

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Norton Security

How to fix the problem with Norton Security and Windows 10?

Well problem solution looks simple now but It was real challenge to me to find out. Before you install Symantec application you have to update your Windows 10 to at last build 10240! If you are not sure which build do you have right now you can check it in very easy way. It’s simple. Just press Start button on your keyboard with “R”. Then enter “winver” and press enter. You will get current build of your system. And when you update your PC you can install Symantec application and then restart your computers. Everything works now.

It’s time to start my SharePoint Exam 70-339 preparation! Yes, finally… I have passed several exams for SharePoint 2013. From administration and developer path. Especially I am very proud of my MCSD certificate, but I don’t posses any SharePoint 2016 certification. So I decided that time has come. I take a look on existing exams for SharePoint, but at this moment there’s only one exam… Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016. It’s strange to me. And there’s no any developer exam for example.

MCSD

Instead of wasting my time I decide to start with this single exam. Then later I will decide what’s next. This exam will measure following skills:

Bellow you can find some useful information about my SharePoint Exam 70-339 preparation.

I don’t know if it will works for you, but for me it’s ok. First of all we need a lab. I think that we agree that we can’t make a tests on live environment, and not all features of SharePoint 2016 you use on your production environment. If you are not sure how to do this there’s very good book to start: Building a SharePoint 2016 Home Lab. You can buy it for example on Amazon.

Important thing here is usually we build single server virtual machines. It works perfect as developer solution, but for this exam we need something better. Of course If you have money to spend you can always use Azure. Just few clicks and you can get running farm. Well, I have to use my local PC to play with it 🙂

Anyway if your farm is ready it’s time to start learning :). At this moment there official Microsoft book which can be used to study. Exam Ref 70-339 Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016.

From my point of view those two books are core elements in my preparation. If someone prefer video over book reading there’s another options.

For SharePoint 2013 exams there’s a lot of recordings at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Unfortunately at this moment there’s nothing for SharePoint 2016. But still there’s hope for us :). If you have access to Pluralsight you can use three courses from Vlad Catrinescu about SharePoint Exam 70-339:

Today I would like to show you how to do Starting SharePoint development. Have your read my previous post: SharePoint developer who’s that? It was very popular and I get some questions how to start SharePoint journey. Well, it’s a question which is not so easy to answer as we have to consider a few factors here. It’s my personal opinion here, some people could have different thoughts.

First of all we have to decide which platform we chose. At this moment we have possibility to make a development with following platforms:

SharePoint on premise 2016, 2013 (I am aware of SharePoint 2010)

SharePoint online

I assume that SharePoint server 2016 will implement some of SharePoint online features. Another important point to consider is SharePoint on premise future. I heard different voices here. Some people says that SharePoint server 2016 is last version, and some others that we will see at last two versions in the future. Well, in my opinion there’s still discussion in Microsoft teams. We have very interesting example here. We can see a lot of changes in terms of SharePoint developer certification path – MCSD. At the begging we get information about expiration, then it was extended and now there’s no SharePoint developer path…

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sharepoint developer

Starting SharePoint development. Why SharePoint online?

I will suggest to you safe way here in my opinion. If you don’t have any SharePoint experience or there’s no need to manage existing on premise infrastructure forget about SharePoint sever at the begging. You should focus on SharePoint online. Why, someone could ask…

It could be for or against, but cloud is the future. People says that 🙂

If you learn SharePoint online coding you can write a code for entire Office 365 platform

Office 365 is key solution in Microsoft portfolio

Office 365 is most dynamic Microsoft product

If you learn SharePoint online coding you can use those skills in other, non Microsoft project, JavaScript is back 🙂

Office 365 Developer Program

How to start SharePoint development?

So we know which platform to chose. So how we starting SharePoint development?

In first step you should register at Office developer portal. You will get for free access for Office 365 developer tenant for one year. It’s also good to know that you will get Microsoft Office for free. There’s a lot of training materials. Please take a look at Waldek Mastykarz recordings related to SharePoint framework, which seems to be SharePoint future.

Second website to register is Visual Studio Dev Essentials. You can find there free 3 month PluralSight subscription. This is online training platform with very good training videos. For example you can find there Andrew Connell or Sahil Malik training.

We have two more websites to considers. First of all please Technet site. There’s a lot of training materials provided by Microsoft, also for SharePoint server. Second site is of course Microsoft Virtual Academy. There’s a lot of things to watch. It’s also good starting point.

Everything what I wrote here is for free. You will need just time and will to learn. Also please remember that tools for SharePoint development are free. Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio Community edition is absolutely enough for starting SharePoint development.